


saudade

by kyasuu



Category: Original Work
Genre: Depression, Female Narrator, Gen, Second person POV, Suicidal Ideation, prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:02:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25471324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyasuu/pseuds/kyasuu
Summary: You think you would love to tell your friends about her. Tellherabout your friends.But the words don’t come. And you keep talking, anyway, about something or another. It feels like flying.It's something like an extended metaphor. For what, you're not sure.
Kudos: 2





	saudade

**Author's Note:**

> written for a creative writing class. please tread carefully.
> 
> dedicated to someone who never existed and never will.

You meet her there, at the front gate of your college campus. It’s your first day, and feels like you are the only people in the world.

Somehow, you find yourself talking to her. You don’t remember your classes, even though you must have attended them because the sun is slipping down the sky and turning it pink, bathing the cotton candy clouds in a warm glow, and you don’t skip classes, ever. 

You’re not sure what you talk to her about, either. It must be truly engrossing for you to lose track of time, or maybe you’re simply entranced by everything _her_ , except she’s the very definition of a plain girl. Her hair is mousy brown, freckled skin a warm, light brown. She’s so plain, you can’t even make out her features, and you don’t know what color her eyes are even when she looks at you.

And yet.

And yet you sit and talk to her for so long under the sweet-colored sky. There’s something in your chest, warm and affectionate. You think you would love to tell your friends about her. Tell _her_ about your friends.

But the words don’t come. And you keep talking, anyway, about something or another. It feels like flying.

* * *

Work sucked, but the idea of not having a roof over your head sucked even more. So you sucked it up even harder and went to work to pay for your shitty apartment on the sixth shitty floor of a shitty apartment complex and no shitty elevator, only those shitty concrete stairs that made you feel like one wrong move and you’d slip and fall and snap your shitty neck on the last shitty step in a way that wouldn’t even have the shitty courtesy to kill you and end your shitty existence.

So it was a lot of shit, you thought as you made your way down those shitty concrete stairs, two at a time. Maybe, if you were lucky, you’d miss a step. Break a bone or three. Skip work. And then work overtime for the next couple of fucking years to pay off that shitty hospital bill. At that point, it’d probably just be easier to fucking die.

That was how it was for most things, though.

You stepped out of the apartment complex, closing the gate behind you with a loud, shaking rattle and paying no heed to the grating noise. When you first moved here, it hurt your ears. Now, you didn’t have the energy to give a rat’s ass.

There was dog shit outside of the complex. A lot of shit indeed. You didn’t know who the hell decided not to clean it up, either, because none of the residents here had dogs. They weren’t allowed, even though snorting coke and pissing on the walls were.

As you headed down to the bus stop, you patted your pockets. Ah, shit. Forgot your phone again, didn’t you? You considered going back to fetch it, but decided against it, like you always did. Nobody called you, anyway. The only people who did could eat your ass as far as you were concerned.

You stood at the bus stop, waiting for it to pick you up. There was an old lady sitting at the bench with her tiny dog between her legs. It was an ugly motherfucker, with crooked yellow teeth and patchy brown fur. You had no idea what breed it was, because you didn’t know any dog breeds beyond shiba inus and chihuahuas and this thing didn’t look like either of them. It looked at you, pink tongue peeking out as it panted happily, tail sweeping on the ground like it hadn’t taken a massive dump outside of your apartment complex.

The fuck was its problem? you thought. There was nothing to be happy about when looking at you. You glared at it. It just looked at you with that stupid look on its stupid ugly face and wagged its tail harder.

You realized you were getting mad at a dog and looked away with a scowl. The old lady didn’t seem to notice, but you were pretty sure she wouldn’t have noticed if the sky fell down, either.

The bus was late by ten minutes, which was standard. You got on the bus. The old lady and her stupid not-chihuahua stayed behind.

* * *

She plays video games too. Maybe she’s not a heavy gamer like some of the people you know who can clock thousands of hours into a game, but she plays some of the same things you do. “I like this character,” she tells you, pointing at one.

“There a reason?” you ask.

“I like her story,” she says. “She went through a lot, but she kept her head above water. What about you? Who do you like?”

You look at the list of characters and pick out your favorite. “This one.”

She blinks, looking at the character you chose, and parrots your question back at you. “Is there a reason?”

You shrug. “She’s hot.”

She bursts out laughing. You don’t know what it quite sounds like, but it falls softly on your ears anyway. It’s a good sound, and you think you could listen to it forever.

* * *

“You’re late,” your boss shouted when you walked through the door, like he always did.

“Yes, sir,” you replied dully, like you always did.

“It’s a bad look for my store!” he said, like he always did.

“Sorry, sir,” you said, like you always did.

And then you got to work, like you always did, because he couldn’t fire you and you couldn’t quit. Nobody else was willing to work here. Nobody else was willing to hire you.

All in all it didn’t make for a very successful business model, but it wasn’t your money keeping a dinky little boat like this afloat so you never commented on it and just accepted your easy money for sitting at the front desk and glaring intimidatingly at the few customers who were actually interested or bored enough to come inside.

Seriously, who the fuck went to CD stores in this day and age? Hell, _you_ didn’t even use CDs here. You just pulled up the music you wanted to listen to on the shitty laptop on the desk from the Stone Age and listened to it buffer on the shitty Wi-Fi you borrowed from one of the stores nearby.

But whatever. You didn’t give a shit about your boss’s motivations. He just paid you minimum wage and yelled at you as you blasted Theory of a Deadman’s Hate My Life and hoped he heard it extra loud and clear when Connolly shouted, “My boss is a dick!”

Your only real customers were from out of town, and those were far and few between because nobody wanted to visit a shithole like this. It wasn’t like the store got new shipments often, if at all, either, so there wasn’t any point to returning once you’d been once. You could count the number of times you’ve had to restock the shelves on one hand, and you’d been working here for years now.

You used to get troublemakers in the store, too. Lots of huge guys like a whole foot taller than you, all muscly and shit, like they ate beef for every fucking Hobbit meal of the day and worked out to X Gon’ Give It To Ya and used the n-word unironically because they had a black friend. The whole shtick that screamed toxic masculinity.

“You should smile more, sexy,” you were told once by one of them. So you had bared your teeth like a feral wolf and crushed the fingers reaching out to your face. He was lucky you hadn’t torn them off. The human jaw was capable of that.

He was alone that time. If he weren’t, you imagine he would’ve just beaten the shit out of you. As it was, he probably realized he wouldn’t be coming out of a fight with you unscathed. You continued to grin at him, your teeth stained with his blood, and he beat it.

He never came back, though. You expected it for a bit before you realized he really wasn’t going to do anything to you, not that you really cared either way. It probably would’ve been better than the utter fucking monotony that was your life.

That was how it went most of the time anyway, back then. Now, it didn’t happen at all. Anyone in the area already knew to stay the fuck away from the feral bitch with teeth in her vagina by now.

So you sat at the front desk, staring at the ceiling with buffering music playing as you counted down the seconds until your shift ended.

* * *

There’s a large dirt track that circles around a huge patch of grass. It reminds you a lot of middle school, when you’d slog through the mile run once a week. It seems out of place on a college campus, but you don’t pay it much mind. Instead, you just walk around it leisurely with her.

It’s sunset. It’s beautiful, a fiery blaze that stretches and melts into blue.

You don’t stop talking, about your art major, about what anime you’re keeping up with this season, about other stupid shit. It feels easy and natural, and she seems to be enjoying herself too, even as it grows darker. The feeling that you should be going home is ignored in favor of just hoping the day will never end.

It feels like if you leave, you won’t see her again. It’s been less than a day, and already the thought of that causes your heart to clench. You wonder if it’s the same for her. It’s like she fills a hole in your heart that you hadn’t even known was there.

You don’t tell her this, of course, but she fits you in a way you hadn’t known possible. 

“It’s getting late,” she says hesitantly as you reach the end of the track and your heart sinks. The entire campus is empty now, or at least you can’t see or hear anyone nearby. In the darkness lit only by stars, it’s even more difficult to see her face. 

“Yeah,” is all you can manage in response, and the two of you stand there, still.

* * *

You trudged up the stairs again. You hadn’t done anything, yet you were tired, weary in a way that was deeper than physical. You fumbled with your key a few times, shoving it into your lock without much success before realizing it was unlocked. You forgot again, huh.

You slammed the door shut behind you with your foot, only barely remembering to lock it behind you. Whatever. Even if someone broke in, there wasn’t anything of worth stealing except maybe your phone from 2015 or the probably expired pizza rolls in your fridge.

You ignored the annoyed shout from your neighbor about being fucking quiet you piece of shit, you do this every _fucking_ day, and kicked dusty unused canvases on the floor out of the way. You should probably get rid of them, but that would cost effort you weren’t willing to spare. 

Your phone was on the table by your bed. It wasn’t even charging, meaning bringing it wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. You jabbed the charger into the appropriate port and laid down on your bed to stare up at your dirty ceiling.

You weren’t sure how long you just laid there but the brief vibration of your phone turning back on brought you out of whatever trance you found yourself in. You rolled onto your side, reaching for the device, and blinked in surprise at the notifications on your phone.

Three missed calls. Two from your mother. One from a number you didn’t recognize. You swiped and cleared the notifications. There were several text messages and a couple Facebook notifications. You didn’t even use Facebook. It was just one of those apps you downloaded and never deleted even if you hated the stupid notifications because hating it just became a part of your routine.

_Happy birthday!_

Your eyes moved to the date. Your birthday, huh. How old were you again? It took longer than it should have, but you eventually remembered. Twenty-seven, or something like that.

You recognized most of the people who sent you birthday messages. Some of them you didn’t remember. None of them you were particularly close to. Maybe a long time ago, but after college, you lost contact.

Well, not quite. More like you drifted apart. Yeah. That was about right. These days they just sent you birthday wishes whenever Facebook notified them or something.

That was okay. Socializing was exhausting, anyway, and you weren’t about to saddle them with all of your bullshit. You knew you were an asshole. You also didn’t care.

That was probably why you didn’t have any friends.

You opened your phone to clear your notifications. When they were gone, your lockscreen was visible, some pretty art of a character you used to love from some video game you used to play.

You didn’t even remember her name.

You shut off your phone and tossed it back onto the nightstand carelessly. It hit the wood loudly but you just grabbed the sleeping pills from the drawer, popped a few too many, and turned off the light.

You rolled over on to your other side, closed your eyes, and went to sleep.

* * *

“It’s time to go back,” she says. She sounds sad.

You know it is, but you really don’t want her to go. “It was fun,” you tell her honestly, and she smiles at you. “Will I see you again?”

Her smile turns a little pained, and her lip quivers a little even as she bites it. “I’d like to,” she says. “If that means anything at all here.”

Of course it does, you want to say.

Instead, you say, desperately, “You should meet the rest of my friends some time. They’d love you.” Even as you say it, you don’t know who you would tell, or who she would meet.

“I’m sure I’d love them too,” she replies, and sounds sincere. She moves a little closer and takes your hands in hers. Your hands move, but you can’t feel hers. This close, it becomes more and more obvious that you don’t know what she looks like. The stars, too bright in the sky, do nothing to illuminate her features.

And she tells you, “It’s time to wake up.”

* * *

Sunlight filters through your blinds.

You wake up, still exhausted. You don’t feel like you slept at all even though you know immediately that you slept through your alarm.

It doesn’t matter, because you had a wonderful dream last night.

For the first time in a long time, your chest is full of something. It’s so full, it’s spilling over, through the lump in your throat and pouring out of your eyes.

You curl into yourself with a quiet, shaky sob. You’re so _lonely_. The dull, hollow ache of the loneliness in your chest is so, so sharp now, like a raw, freshly opened injury. It’s gutting, like something is carving out your insides. And it hurts, it hurts, it _hurts_.

What a wonderful dream, you think, tears soaking your sheets. One hand clutches at your chest, like that will alleviate your pain.

* * *

If only you could remember what it was about.

**Author's Note:**

> come harass me on twitter @kyaasuu.
> 
> the girl in the dream is based on a girl i met in a dream. i don't know her name, who she's based on, or if i'll ever see her again, but i thought writing this would immortalize her. just in case we meet again.


End file.
